Please, don’t let the Watchmen movie suck

I read the Watchmen graphic novel recently (before I found out about the movie adaption), and I loved it. I’m so used to Japanese manga that it was a bit jarring at first to read a western-style graphic novel, but it really blew me away with the psychological depth of the characters.

That said, the first thing I felt when I saw the movie trailer wasn’t excitement. I hate to be pessimistic, but movie adaptions of works I like don’t have the greatest track record. Numerous Hollywood movies have been made based on stories by Philip K. Dick — one of my favorite writers — but the only one of the lot that was any good was Blade Runner. I still remember seeing Paycheck (a movie based on one of the better PKD short stories), and wondering how in the hell the movie made it to theaters without anyone in charge standing up and saying “Hey, wait a minute… this is a piece of shit.” Additionally, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie pissed me off no end, not because it deviated from the story, but because it was simply unfunny and didn’t resemble Douglas Adam’s style of humor at all.

So, my expectations are a bit low.

I would absolutely love for the Watchmen movie to be a brilliant film, true to the depth and intelligence of the graphic novel, but that isn’t going to happen. Hoping for that is just asking for disappointment. I’m trying to be realistic.

All I want is for the movie not to suck. I just don’t want to be angry when I leave the theater. Is that too much to as?

Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-08-15 | Filed under: Current events, Opinion, Other | 2 responses

American McGee’s Grimm

I’ve had a paid GameTap account for a while now, and I’ve also been a fan of American McGee’s previous works, so I’ve been eagerly awaiting the Grimm games. I wasn’t disappointed.
If you don’t have GameTap, you can sign up for a free account and play the first episode. I highly recommend you consider getting a paid GameTap account, though. It’s a great service with lots of great games.

Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-08-07 | Filed under: Tech and games | no responses

NYTimes article on web trolls

Read the whole article here.

This was the most interesting thing I’d read in a long time. The author obviously did a lot of research, and it’s very accurate; I don’t generally go into these sorts of articles (articles having to do with online/tech/internet related topics) expecting the writer to know more about the subject than I do, but that’s just what I got.

I have personal experience running forums, so I know that the one guaranteed way to get rid of trolls is to ignore them, and that’s essentially the conclusion the author came to. If someone goes to a Mac forum and posts a rant about how Windows is better than MacOS because “I can right click lolz” or something, and everyone ignores it, the troll will leave. If some idiot responds with a badly written, angry rebuttal, full of spelling errors (which is invariably what happens), that’s like setting out a feast for the troll.

Reading this almost made me want to write a story about these people. I found them very interesting, especially Fortuny.

Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-08-01 | Filed under: Other, Tech and games | 3 responses